Dennis Kihlstadius is the owner of consulting firm Produce Technical Services and widely regarded as an expert on post-harvest handling of climacteric fruit. He has taught the UC Davis Fruit Ripening & Ethylene Management Workshop for 23 years and has worked with commodity boards and companies around the world.
I said it before, and I’ll say it again – people buy with their eyes and return with their taste buds. It is true for the papaya just as it is for every other commodity.
The color of the papaya is the number one reason consumers purchase one piece of fruit over another. Flavor and texture are key to getting the repeat purchase.
We’ll address color a bit later. First, how do you make sure you’ve got optimal flavor and texture? The short answer is you make sure the fruit stays above 50 degrees Fahrenheit throughout the supply chain.
Chilling damage is a time and temperature relationship. The more time a given fruit or veggie spends below its chilling temp, the greater likelihood that chilling injury will be observed when the product is displayed on the retail shelf. Then there is the issue of the flavor enzymes being destroyed by the cold, rendering a not-so-flavorful eating experience.
So, for retailers: Never put papayas on a reefer display, and never keep them in the backroom cooler. Do you put your bananas there? Most everyone knows about bananas and chilling injury; papaya, mangos and other tropical fruits are no different.
You’ll know these instructions haven’t been heeded if you look at the fruit and see small spots on the surface of the fruit that make it look like a hummingbird attacked it over and over – or if you see a more severe issue that looks like a small woodpecker practiced on the fruit’s surface.
Those “sunken spots” are called lenticles, and lenticles are like the canary in the coal mine. They tell you that papaya was exposed to temperatures below 50 degrees at some point along the supply chain. (You also see this with bell peppers and mangos that were stored at temperatures that were too low.) Papayas do not like being kept below 50, especially if they were not harvested at a quarter-yellow color or higher.
There are many varieties of papayas, and this can be an issue as some of them are hybrids and different than the maradol that is grown in Mexico. However, the temperatures needed for longer shelf life and a good eating experience are pretty much the same.
De-greening
There are those who think you can “ripen” a papaya, and I am here to tell you that you cannot change the SSC – soluble solid content, a refractometer test measurement, often referred to as brix – by using ethylene in a ripening room.
You can only change the external color, not the sweetness – and the color is what people are looking for when purchasing. A good eating experience brings them back for a repeat purchase.
Back in the day, when Gary Campisi was the senior director of quality control at Walmart, they use to de-green papaya in the banana ripening rooms. This process, when done correctly, will actually give you more shelf life and will cut shrink. There is a “recipe” for this process.
Again, papayas have minimal to no starch reserves, so they do not get sweeter in the ripening rooms. To get a papaya to have more sugar, you have to let it mature longer on the tree and pick it with a half yellow or higher stage.
However, when you use the ripening rooms, you have a papaya that is de-greening on the fifth or sixth day at retail, instead of only de-greening after it has been dehydrating on the shelf for 8-10 days. When you put the fruit in the ripening room, you are helping the papaya do what it was naturally going to do anyway only in a shorter time frame.
The more time it sits on the shelf, the more “customer damage” can occur. Remember that turning your on-shelf inventory helps to cut shrink and have better quality on the display.
Keep in mind there are papayas that have a natural greenish look, and there are green papayas sold in some markets because they are used in the green stage. In fact, that digestive enzyme found in a papaya is at its highest level when the papaya is green. As the papaya turns yellow, it loses most of that enzyme.
A little history
At one time, there was a movement to start a papaya commission or board, but after several meetings of the papaya grower-shipper community the idea died.
That is too bad in the sense that some good results could have come from this type of an organization, like consensus on how to properly handle papayas, how to merchandise them and when to have sales to take advantage of availability.
All of that would have translated into “best handling practices” – similar to what happened for bananas and tomatoes, as we discussed in the last article in this series – and increased papaya sales.
So where do you go for good information about papaya? Online, of course – but you have to have a baseline of knowledge to weed out all of the “BS” (bad science) that is out there.
I have studied and worked with papaya for over 20 years, and I can tell you that a good source is the Produce Facts resource on the University of California, Davis website. It also helps to know Dr. Jeff Brecht, one of the world’s authorities on mangos and papaya. He has been doing research on them for many years at the University of Florida, Gainesville.
The bottom line
If you only have one takeaway from this article, it should be this: Keep your papayas above 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
Temperature abuse is the number one reason for shrink in the produce industry, and it is in the millions of dollars every year. So take care of those papayas, mangos and other tropical fruits, and you’re bound to see improvement in your bottom line for those categories.
Repeat sales means more money and less shrink. At the end of the day this is all about money and improved customer satisfaction.